Microsoft needs to stop trash-talking IE6 and just trash it

Until recently, I consulted for a Fortune 500 which was still issuing IE6 on its desktops. The company just embarked on a huge project to update to IE6, and it faces all the issues mentioned in the article. It will be at least a year before IE6 can go away.

I don't blame MSFT for supporting IE6. While the article advocates rapid abandonment, the effect on corporate perceptions would be disastrous. Companies like the one I consulted for are terrified of being left stranded.

What would really help my former client would be for MSFT to provide IE6 bundled as an app that could exist along IE8. While not ideal, users could be told to use IE6 for certain corporate applications that were built and tested in the early 2000's against only IE. This would make the transition much easier. This would also benefit Microsoft as the Windows 7 roll-out likely depends on IE6 elimination.

> [Microsoft] is 100 percent committed to the concept of stable, long-lived, versioned Web browser platforms. This strategy makes no sense in the fast-changing world of the Web.

What? HTML 5 isn't done yet, and HTML 4 hasn't changed for ten years. This sounds like more complaining from authors doing sloppy js-only work.

Sometimes incompatibility is a necessary evil, but that's not true on the web. I take pride in valid documents with progressive enhancement which I fully expect are usable in any browser that has ever existed.